Qmail Support Forum

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

I hesitate to ask a question which may spark a religous war (which is
not the intent), and would like to ask, insofar as possible, that
answers be primarily quantitative and not qualitative. I am currently
running a couple of Postfix servers (one of which runs a single domain
and delivers all mail to real system accounts, piece of cake), the other
of which is a hosting server which handles numerous virtual domains with
account information stored in a mysql database and virtual user mail
delivery. I have seen numerous articles/tutorials on setup of Postfix
for use with a MySQL backend and am familiar with what it can do.

Lately, I have noticed on this list a lot of traffic from people using
LDAP of some flavor as the backend to Postfix for the account info. My
question really, is what is(are) the (dis)advantage(s) of using LDAP vs.
using MySQL. Is it simply another way to skin the same cat, or does it
allow for anything more/different/better? I know the question probably
sounds a bit naive, but I have fairly little experience with LDAP in
general and am not sure what it might offer me that I would be remiss to
ignore. I'm looking for both (dis)advantages related to strictly
Postfix usage (i.e. performance, ease of admin, etc), and secondary
benefits (i.e. "LDAP works great with blah-blah-blah which we also use,
and it makes life easier having all the info in one place").

Thanks,
--
Nathanael Hoyle
Systems and Networking
Speed Express Networks

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

Oh dear, and I thought this subject had been beaten to death.

I think it's best to summarise the main factors as

1. What you are familiar with

2. the extent to which you want to integrate other information with the
mail system data (e.g. login verification)

3. the extent to which you want to take an 'off the shelf' solution and
implement it quickly.

LDAP is favoured by integration, MySQL by off the shelf solutions.

Peformance wise there is (probably) some benefit in LDAP but only the
busiest sites are likely to notice the difference and even they might
have to look hard.

Folks, I think we've got to the stage where this needs to go in the FAQ.